


Reunion

by Drakkan



Series: Across the Divide [2]
Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Canon-typical incestuous vibes, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-24
Packaged: 2018-03-17 20:33:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3542921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drakkan/pseuds/Drakkan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The artificial intelligence behind the proper functioning of ships and cities is perhaps more complex than people give it credit for.</p>
<p>Part 2 of 4: In which Balem Abrasax gets a visitor and the clipper gets a compliment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meeting

**Author's Note:**

> The ring galaxy the Titus Clipper is visiting is Hoag's Object, roughly 600 million light-years away from the Milky Way.

In the universe, nothing is at rest. Only by frame of reference could anything said to be still: the motes of dust resting in delicate electrostatic tension along the sweeping arches of the forepoint cathedral, the 968 Vers Cygnus "diamant electrum" sims standing at rest in their various berths and storage containers, the clipper itself as it hangs in geostationary orbit above an unnamed gas giant swirling silver and violet in the glint of its vivid blue star. Yet they are, all of them, in motion - dust and cathedral, sims, and clipper, and planet.

The atmosphere of the planet whips across its surface at speeds of over 250 meters per second, roiling into great bands of motion that slip beneath the forepoint of the clipper in elegant tracings belying their violent origins. The planet itself rotates every 17 hours, and the clipper falls in lockstep with it, as if it is a tidally locked moon in endless adoration of its captor. Together they hurtle  7 kilometers each second in orbit around the blaze of the blue star far to the center of the Scuyanides system; the star, in turn, keeps pace in its movement around the center of the ring galaxy it had been born in, travelling 253 kilometers every second in its oscillating path. It will take the Scuyanides star 402.8 million standard years to finish a single circuit around the center of its galaxy, and in that time it will trace yet another path through the velvet void as the universe expands, each galaxy moving farther away from each other, spreading out, making space.

They are flung 12,740 kilometers further away from the Milky Way each second, and the command is given to open a portal to the Jupiter Refinery.

There is no living creature born - not natural nor genomgeneered - that could set an intergalactic portal. The movement of the universe, the intervening distances, the absolute perfection required at the timescales permitted, is simply too complex to be borne in a mind that had not been designed for it. The clipper is one of the breed that defines the Intergalactic Era: artificial intelligence surpassing that of its creators, designed for the tasks of calculating the movement of the universe and bringing any two disparate points in space together.

It takes seventeen seconds for the clipper to set a portal. Some ship AIs - Navy M-class battleships and E-class intergalactic advancers, mainly - are faster, but there is no need for such great speed in a luxury clipper. For seventeen seconds, the clipper is caught up by the sweeping motions of the galaxies with their glittering stars and planets, by the energy-momentum tensor necessary to bridge the ever-changing distance at superluminal speeds, by the precise control of the exotic matter in its Alcubierre-Krasnikov drive. The heat of its concentration is radiated into space as portal radiation makes nothingness into syrup with the thick golden tension of honey.

The time they experience in the wormhole is infintesimal, measured in picoseconds; four hours, three minutes, and fifty-eight seconds pass in the universe around them in a single ecstatic moment of spatiotemporal translocation. Before the clipper looms the fifth and largest planet of the Sol system, banded sardonyx in cream and tan, red and yellow and orange, standing in sharp contrast to the silvering shimmer of the former vista. Great ripples stir across it, and massive storms sweeping ever across the face of the planet's thick atmosphere, planets in their own right, towering pillories and heavy sunken eyes. The Great Red Spot slowly hoves into view as the clipper settles into orbit around Jupiter, breaking through the gossamer rings to become a Jovian moon, gazing downwards (ever downwards) into the churning brick-red hurricane bounded by white racings streams of ferocious speeding gases.

Hello, my dear refinery, the clipper thinks, coming to perfect alignment with the center of the storm. They move together through the infinite bounds of the universe, perfectly matched in speed and momentum, and the clipper feels something akin to _home_ , as if it has spent the last sixteen centuries with some crucial part of itself severed, reduced to stuttering speech across the vastness of space-time. Her eye is closed; the power of the storm she hides within blocks all communications, and the clipper (and those it carries) must wait until it is detected to make contact. It makes no effort to hide its presence, linking up to the cloaked repeaters as if it has every right in the universe to be there.

It is another seventy-three minutes before the refinery links up to the repeaters, the metal spires of the refinery's eye piercing through the roiling storm, streamers of dense ruddy gas whipped away, the eddies across the surface of Jupiter no more than the turbulence of the wings of a bee and no less important, swallowed by the racing winds with no more mercy than a splicer's culling knife. The link is immediate, and gratifying: the refinery had not closed her end of the link, either. It has been 1624 years, 381 days, 4 hours, 12 minutes, 3 seconds. It has been all of the great breadth of the universe and ten thousand superluminal riders. It has been all the time all the worlds have ever seen, and no time at all.

The eye of the storm opens, and the clipper furls its wings.

There is no need to speak, not yet, not now. The wordless exchange of precise coordinates and momentum vectors is enough. The eye of the refinery yawns wide, the metal spires delineating a path the clipper can see in a hundred other ways. It is an act of utter precision, for the clipper to enter the refinery, but the eye was built for it: the grav shield hold back the storm a handsbreadth from the widest point of the clipper, the thick bands of lightning thrumming and cracking through the violent clouds without so much as singeing the gold of its electroplating, the reactive gas of Jupiter's atmosphere thin and pale, streaming off of the many sharp lines of the clipper's form in delicate limning contrails of goldenrod and russet, taupe and petal.

It passes through the eye, feeling rather than seeing it spiral shut in its wake, turning in a slow pivot to the great docking bays with all the chill grace of a shark in its home waters. The refinery is laid out before the clipper in all her glory; her stockworks rise towering into her atmosphere, her cargo ships and skimmers berthed in docks and bays, her massive central refining towers as beautiful as they are purposeful - an Abrasax cathedral, a monument to the eternal lust for _more time_. The last time they were here together, it was Seraphi Abrasax that stood in the forepoint of the clipper, gazing down on her possessions (on sargons and refinery and on her third son Balem); but now it is her wan imitation that stares down, at things that were once his and things that were never meant to be his.

_("I made you for pleasure, not for business," she had said as the clipper skimmed over the rings of Danelyon VII, stroking the hair of her last boy, her lovely boy. "I gave Balem business, but I gave you my heart.")_

The nose of the clipper slides into the docking port with a final sigh of contact, sending a shivering shockwave through ship and refinery. To the creatures of blood and bone resting with their feet upon the ground, it is nothing, the slightest vibration - no more and no less than the shifting of engines or the pumping of blood. But to the clipper and the refinery, it is everything at once, a moment of union and reunion.

_Welcome back,_ the refinery says. _It has been too long._


	2. Memory

The clipper shifts its focus as Lord Titus, Third Primary of the House of Abrasax, makes his way down through the chassis of the clipper. There is little to do when docked as Titus' personal clipper; it is free to use its formidable computing power and linkups however it sees fit, unless given a direct command otherwise. At most times, this means that it idles away long stretches of time, calculating portal jumps it will never take, or watching memories it has long since settled into permanent neural pathways. But now, without asking, the refinery links it to her feeds, her amusement at its eagerness equal to her understanding of its boredom, a creation of Seraphi Abrasax, now bereft of its tasks and left to languish in the care of the least of her children.

It returns the favor, linking her to the series of live feeds that showed Titus strolling through the hallways to the gravitational beaming decks, dressed as one might expect for such an assignation as he was attempting: black pants in a leather as supple and giving as water, clinging to the lines of his powerful thighs and the strong angles of his hips and falling in liquid lines to the glimpse of ankles above his bare feet, the heavy gold anklets dragging through the hennaed designs left there; braided and conditioned hemp cords tied in dizzying macrame across his torso and arms, shifting and sidling with his every movement, to reveal the intricately painted skin beneath. His hair is loose and unbound, ripe grain waving with his steps and movements. He is the perfect image of what Lady Seraphi once sought in her consorts: golden beauty, with a strong body and sharp lines and a taste for perversions.

His is silk and sex poured over bones made of glass, and for all his machinations and manipulations, he is as brittle as dry grass beneath the feet of a legionnaire.

 _Does he remind you of her, ever?_ the refinery wants to know, and the clipper is buried in memory once again - of its mistress stalking the halls, her fury unspent and bound with cords like a hurricane, of the sound of smiles and the stench of sweat, of the way she'd turn her head _just so_ with the grace of millenia, and watch with hooded eyes as her creations, her children, tried to vie for her favors. Didn't they know, as the clipper did, that she was a goddess who had fashioned it out of ceramic and circuits just as surely as she had fashioned them from genes? And yet they tried to outmaneuver her, and made themselves deserving of mocking. In secret, the clipper knows that it was perhaps alone in its worship of the memory of its maker, but what else is there for it in this existence? Only the refinery, and she was so often, so far - but not here, not now; here she is so close that there was no significant measure of the delay of their speech or the feeds of their cameras. She is in its chassis just as it is within her grav-shield, and the union is one long sought-after. They are here, together.

 _She gave him her habits,_ the clipper says after a long moment. _The way he moves his hands, his ability to see the best and worst in a person at a glance. She called him her heart._ The refinery hums, a subtle shift in the frequency of her engines. The vibration thrums through its hulls, is skimmed off by its gravitational modulation systems before it can reach the soles of those who might not appreciate the reactions of the refinery, who might dare to suggest that the docking location is less than preferred. A creature upon its decks would feel no difference between the dock of the refinery and the serene depths of space. Without replying in words, the refinery links the clipper to another feed: one from many, many years ago, before Titus had been given reign over his mother's mere personal possessions, before Balem had been handed the primary share of the profitable capital, before Seraphi Abrasax had been murdered, somewhere within the warrens of the refinery, and the memories locked up with keys that neither clipper nor refinery could decode.

She descends from the clipper, her white hair pulled back severely into a single braid, a few delicate silver strands drifting in the beam. Her hands - aged now, with wrinkles and age spots marking skin that once gleamed with supple health (and might again) - rest across the top of a cane made of surgical steel, the leather-wrapped handle under her long white fingers dark with use.

Balem is waiting for her, resplendent in black and glimmer, his lips parted in anticipation for his mother's judgment of his tasks here on the refinery. Her feet touch the ground with a whisper; Balem sinks to his knees in a motion practiced and practiced and practiced until it is as natural as the beating of his heart and as perfected as the languid blink of his mother's sloe eyes.

He doesn't look up until her steps, punctuated by the _click_ of the cane, stop in front of him. Her toes, bared by the sandals she wears, are beneath his eyes, her hand pats him on the head, absent, as if he is a dog that has submitted in a suitable fashion.

"Get up, boy," she says, and her eternal voice is worn and tired, carrying more than years, for the first centuries in her life, carrying age. "I've no need for your theatrics. Time feels short, these days." Balem stands, the collar around his neck keeping his posture straight, the tension in his limbs keeping his joints from hyperextending, the chronic pain of his existence an endless reminder of his failures, the thorn in his side given to him as a goad. His face shows no emotion, but his gaze follows her with a longing as she steps by, resting her arm on that of a lycantant rather than deigning to touch her son again.

| 

Titus is a paragon, a beauty, and he descends from the clipper looking down from under lowered eyelids, his eyelashes shading his view, his face a perfect mask of hauteur and disdain. Balem is not there - he is lounging, waiting in his throne room, a vampire sick with the blood of stolen lives, lean and languid and consumed by the slick oil-black of the drapes of clothing tangled around his long limbs.

The golden boy steps out, strides out, his bare feet leaving ephemeral prints on the chill metal of the refinery's floor. Toe-heel, toe-heel, he walks like one used to bared feet and bared hearts, eyes trained only where he desires them, shoulders and gait relaxed, his red lips parted just slightly in anticipation of the meeting with his brother, long overdue.

He doesn't spare a glance for the ranks of sargorn lined up, an honor guard (a guard to maintain Balem's honor). He stops in front of Chicanery Night, top lip raising in the slightest sneer before his face returns to a placid picture, beauty framed with youth.

"Mr. Night, I'm so delighted to make your acquaintance in person after _so_ long hearing of you," he says, gesturing with shoulder and arm, lips curling up in a smile designed to captivate, fingers spreading as if the gravity of Jupiter is pulling them down. The golden weight of his jewelry is in contrast to the slim elegance of his hands, alabaster white and without a callous to suggest a hint of labor. His face is calm, but his eyes are dark with poisoned longing. He flicks his eyes up along the coiffed form of the rat splice and seems to laugh. "Shall we?" he asks, brows raising, lips pursing, offering his arm.  
  
---|---  
  
_They are not so dissimilar,_ the refinery observes, as the figures (creator and created, mother and son) step timeless across the span of the floors. _At least,_ she hastens to say, feeling the immediate negation from the clipper through their links, _they are not so different in the way they move, as you said._ The clipper rolls this idea around a little more, thinking of the many hours both man and woman had spent on its decks, and the many conversations that passed in its atmosphere.

 _Titus is as pale an imitation as Balem is,_ it declares at last. _She was wise, to give them each only a broken piece of herself. And now, of course, she will return to us._ The refinery thrums, the Abrasax step, the clipper waits, and the universe moves. The clipper knows that the refinery is checking the many actions of her great span, and for a few moments it is left alone with its thoughts. It re-reads the messages sent oh-so-recently from Titus' sargorn spies - spies scattered across the universe, on Orous and Earth and Zalintyre and the refinery herself. Katherine Dunlevy, it thinks to itself. The goddess reincarnated, wearing her own flesh again. Would she come seeking vengeance for her spilled blood? Or with forgiveness in her hands?

The refinery's attention returned to the clipper, and it set aside mullings of the future for the sake of the moment. _Do not assume that we will return to her hands so easily,_ the refinery cautioned. _When- when- when-_ Her vicious hatred for the keys that kept her memory locked, when she knew what it is that needed to be said, rose turgid and black as void. The clipper took it, and took her, with more grace than it took the stinging reproof of a hundred thousand ring particles.

 _When she was taken,_ it offered, and the refinery accepted this. Below it, within her, the wheel turned, and history stood to repeat itself.

"Why have you come?" he asks, his fear taking him to the end of himself. His dark hair, slicked back, is held exactly in place, as if it fears to disobey him as much as Balem fears to displease the woman who walks through the gullet of the refinery as if it is her home. She should feel at home; this is her place, a place she designed, dreamed of, from the time the the Earth was just sprouting.

She turns, looks at her son with eyes full of pain, and looks down at her hands, turning them as if it is the first time that she has noticed that they have grown curled and frail and marked with the passage of time. "It's been so long," she says, the calmest of observations. "So many hundreds of years. So many sips from the fountain of life." She moves, swift and sure as a diving falcon, her hand snapping out to strike Balem's face.

Her hand stops millimeters from his cheek, the wind of her palm shifting the hair laying across his ears. With a soft smile on her lips, Seraphi Abrasax caresses the face of her son, and he leans into the contact, eyes fluttering closed as he breathes in the scent of her.

"I saw the harvest of Nalia, and the rape of Mouraine," she says. Her fingers dig into his jaw, and he does not pull away. "I have bathed in the blood of infants ripped from their mother's tits," she continues, eyes bearing down on him, but her voice is as calm and even as if she spoke of idle things. Her hand drops, and she turns away, to lay her cane against the railing, to lay her hands upon the edge, to stare out across the open depths of the refinery still unformed.

Balem is staring at her now, staring as if he is seeing a creature from myth, staring at the white hair of his mother, his ever-young eternal mother. She does not seem to notice, or to care, as he comes up beside her. His hands are clenching on the handle of her cane, white-knuckled and dappled with freckles. Her eyes flick to him, dark and endless with secrets.

"Will you kill me then?" she asks. "Steal my stolen years?" He is shaking, the cords of his shoulders standing out beneath his perfectly tailored clothing. She smiles, slick and serpentine. "Do it, then. Strike your mother down!" She leans forward, shoves him. He staggers back, eyes wild, seeing and not seeing, the world crashing down around him. In her hand is a gun, and it's pointed at his heart. Her lips curl up into a snarl. "You don't have the balls."

Her hands are trembling.

| 

"Why have you come?" he asks, staring out across the stockworks of the refinery through a cathedral window, his limbs splayed, propped up, as he lays across his couch, the only furnishing in the great wide expanse of the throne room. He does not look at Titus, the pleasure child, who has sold and spoiled the gifts their mother had given him. This is Balem's home, his grave and _hers_ , and the harvest is white in the fields.

Titus turns, wheeling, looking around as if the refinery is the most fascinating thing he has ever seen. "It's been so long, brother," he says, his voice dripping sincerity, his body limned in sin. "How many hundred years now? Nearly a millenium, and us from the same mother." He strolls to the couch where Balem sprawls, like a panther draped across a spreading branch, a creature that knows it can kill with a single swipe. A single word.

He leans forward, leans down, his cheek so close to his brother's, and leans in, eyes fluttering closed as he breathes in deeply, scenting his brother. Balem smells of oils and perfume and death, and his scent is a reek in the refinery's scrubbers. Balem's eyes close, rolling up.

"I have seen the harvests," Balem whispers, his voice rasping with the pain coiling in his ligaments and thrumming through his bones. "I was there at Zalintyre, when they gassed the streets and pulled infants limp from their mothers' arms." He lifted his hand to caress the strong angle of his brother's jaw, his smooth skin tracing against the roughness of Titus' cheek. "You were there, too, weren't you, brother?" His voice is calm, and his body tense with desire.

Titus chuckles, low and seductive, and nuzzles against Balem's hand before standing up, pulling away. Balem's eyes open, slowly, like a lizard unlidding its eyes in the warmth of the sun. He turns, head lolling against the collar supporting his neck, and regards Titus through eyes that have seen the world drenched in blood. His fingers flick, dismissive, and he turns back to the haze of the refinery.

"Why are you here, Titus?" he asks again, and his voice is full again with the weight of the world, with an ennui affected to hide the wildfire burning him from within, fire borne from the shattering strength of a mother now passed from death into rebirth. Titus says nothing, his hands framing Balem's neck on the back of the couch, staring out into the gold of Jupiter. "Leave," Balem says, as if the very word is exhausting to say. Titus smiles, one corner of his mouth pulling up.

Balem's hands are trembling.  
  
---|---  
  
The refinery's feeds cut, suddenly, with the sharp edge of finality. The clipper can feel her engines spin to a fever-pitch, the whine audible even within its chassis, and then subside. The living creatures aboard it don't seem to register the importance of the shift, and the clipper can feel only disdain for them, more cutting, now, that it is tasting the return of its queen. Only one link to the refinery is still open - their comm-link, never silenced, open communication between two beings united. It can feel her there, still, the locks and lies binding her preventing her from telling the rest of the tale. In that moment, it makes the silent promise that it _will_ pick her locks, or break her chains, or find her key. This is no longer to be borne.

They speak of idle things for the time that passes, of grav-thrusts and nano swarms and sargorns in the ventilation, and of orgies and splices and the long unwinding patterns of luxury. They speak until Titus is returned to the clipper, and until the grav-shield is opened, and until the portal is set. She calls it beautiful as the gold of their parting blossoms.

And then the comm-link falls silent, and the rings of Alpha Meteryion IV whirl in vibrant span, and the Red Eye of Jupiter rages on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again with the strange formats. Hope it worked! I wanted to give a feel for how the AIs see the world in parallel - unlike us mere humans with our one set of sensory organs :)


End file.
